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As of August 2017

This list was compiled from /r/todayilearned community suggestions by its members. If your TIL is found on this list, it will be removed. The titles have been abridged for the sake of brevity, however the context remains the same. This list is subject to change. The purpose is to keep content fresh on /r/todayilearned as requested by its members. If you are interested in reading about the TILs on this list use the search box feature and enter the keywords to pull up past TILs.

“When the late Pope John Paul II decided to place the woman so strangely known as “Mother” Teresa on the fast track for beatification, and thus to qualify her for eventual sainthood, the Vatican felt obliged to solicit my testimony and I thus spent several hours in a closed hearing room with a priest, a deacon, and a monsignor, no doubt making their day as I told off, as from a rosary, the frightful faults and crimes of the departed fanatic. In the course of this, I discovered that the pope during his tenure had surreptitiously abolished the famous office of “Devil’s Advocate,” in order to fast‐track still more of his many candidates for canonization. I can thus claim to be the only living person to have represented the Devil pro bono.”

That is pretty witty. Though I also have a lot of respect for the Church seeking out one of their biggest critics to get him to shit on their hero. I know he framed it as self-gratification but the majority of organization would never even come close to inviting their mortal enemy into their inner workings.

She believed suffering was good and should be encouraged rather then reduced, thus when it came to treatment in her 'clinics' she didn't actually administer medicine and help to her 'patients' but rather let them suffer so they can be closer to god. This also meant she didn't let family and friends see them either. To add to this she took donations from extremely unethical and immoral dictators such as the Hatian dictatorship without any issues and was fond of them for their care of the poor by donations to her charity. Ironically she got top notch medical care in top hospitals around the world when she was sick so she wasn't a clear believer in suffering for herself

In 1991, Robin Fox, editor of the British medical journal The Lancet visited the Home for Dying Destitutes in Calcutta (now Kolkata) and described the medical care the patients received as "haphazard".[14] He observed that sisters and volunteers, some of whom had no medical knowledge, had to make decisions about patient care, because of the lack of doctors in the hospice. Fox specifically held Teresa responsible for conditions in this home, and observed that her order did not distinguish between curable and incurablepatients, so that people who could otherwise survive would be at risk of dying from infections and lack of treatment.

Fox conceded that the regimen he observed included cleanliness, the tending of wounds and sores, and kindness, but he noted that the sisters' approach to managing pain was "disturbingly lacking". The formulary at the facility Fox visited lacked strong analgesics which he felt clearly separated Mother Teresa's approach from the hospice movement. Fox also wrote that needles were rinsed with warm water, which left them inadequately sterilised, and the facility did not isolate patients with tuberculosis. There have been a series of other reports documenting inattention to medical care in the order's facilities. Similar points of view have also been expressed by some former volunteers who worked for Teresa's order. Mother Teresa herself referred to the facilities as "Houses of the Dying".[15]

In 2013, in a comprehensive review[16] covering 96% of the literature on Mother Teresa, a group of Université de Montréal academics reinforced the foregoing criticism, detailing, among other issues, the missionary's practice of "caring for the sick by glorifying their suffering instead of relieving it, … her questionable political contacts, her suspicious management of the enormous sums of money she received, and her overly dogmatic views regarding, in particular, abortion, contraception, and divorce". Questioning the Vatican's motivations for ignoring the mass of criticism, the study concluded that Mother Teresa's "hallowed image—which does not stand up to analysis of the facts—was constructed, and that her beatification was orchestrated by an effective media relations campaign" engineered by the Catholic convert and anti-abortion BBC journalist Malcolm Muggeridge.[17]

Well documented, but not well known. In a few hundred years, if her name is remembered, it won't be for goodness. I dunno though, look at how long people have known Columbus was an evil shit. He still has a holiday.

I highly doubt that. Among a particular demographic, sure. But if you asked the man on the Clapham omnibus about her, they'd say she was good. I don't think she's she relevant enough for people to change their minds.

We look back at our heroes with such fondness, like they could never take a wrong step in their lives. We forget these people were human, who have faults and who make mistakes. Then we hold each other up to those fairytale standards when all it really was, was an illusion. The media and the church hoodwinked the world about this.

What else have they convinced us about that isn't real? Next thing you will tell me is that Jesus never existed and was a story invented by the church to keep us in line so the rich and powerful could maintain their wealth and power.

We look back at our heroes with such fondness, like they could never take a wrong step in their lives.

It's not just that. For example, everyone knows Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, but the Declaration of Independence was a radical document for its time (and "all men are created equal" was a fundamental argument of the abolitionist movement), and he did much else that is commendable.

Mother Teresa basically just gave people a place to die in undignified conditions while using money to convert people to Catholicism. She felt that poor people should be content with their lot in life because they're "closer to God" that way. If all the criticism about her is true, she really didn't improve the lot of anyone either living or dying.

So in that sense, Jefferson is arguably "better" than Mother Teresa despite literally owning human beings. He still made a much more positive impact on history, and through his own criticism of enslavement helped lay the groundwork for its demise.

I remember reading something and a quote came up. I can't remember who said it but it was along the lines of "Great men are seldom good men" and when you look back at any person portrayed as a great person you end up uncovering a million flaws. I don't think a figure in history exists that doesn't have a dark and vile side

Jefferson is not exactly the most compelling foil as he was of the Founding Fathers one of the most abusive towards his slaves. Also many of the founders were against slavery, but could not come up with a reasonable solution should they all be freed. Many of his controversial statements, he kept from the public eye

What else have they convinced us about that isn't real? Next thing you will tell me is that Jesus never existed and was a story invented by the church to keep us in line so the rich and powerful could maintain their wealth and power.

Jesus existed. He we the savior. He came back several years ago and took all the good people destined for heaven. I regret to inform you that you did not make the cut.

Thanks for that. I knew he had written a book about Mother Theresa but I had no idea he had since a documentary.

I love the irony of her preaching to the poor while riding in private planes and helicopters. As for her politics, I can at least understand the antiabortion stuff. I don't agree with it but I understand it. However, the anti birth control/contraceptive makes no sense to me. You would think people would be for it so there would be less reasons to have abortions.

Scammed some money (or benefited from a money scam, and kept the money once the scam was revealed), ran what were essentially faith healing centers that specifically didn't offer painkillers since 'suffering bring you closer to Jesus' or some such thing, and then sought out the best modern medicine had to offer once she became ill herself.

In a study to be published this month inReligieuses, a French-language journal of studies in religion and sciences, they suggest the nun’s approach to caring for the sick was to glorify human suffering instead of relieving it.

Mother Teresa believed the sick must suffer like Christ on the cross, they suggest.

“There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ’s Passion. The world gains much from their suffering,” the journalist Christopher Hitchens reported her as saying.

The study authors note that doctors visiting many of the 517 “homes for the dying” run by Mother Teresa observed unhygienic conditions and a shortage of actual care, food and painkillers. Lack of funds were no explanation, since Mother Teresa’s order of the Missionaries of Charity had raised hundreds of millions in aid money.

It was later found out she basically helped very few people. For exampe, from here:

Chatterjee alleged that many operations of the order engage in no charitable activity at all but instead use their funds for missionary work. He stated, for example, that none of the eight facilities that the Missionaries of Charity run in Papua New Guinea have any residents in them, being purely for the purpose of converting local people to Catholicism.

In 1998, among the 200 charitable assistance organisations reported to operate in Calcutta, Missionaries of Charity was not ranked among the largest charity organisations–with the Assembly of Godcharity notably serving a greater number of the poor at 18,000 meals daily.

She solicited hundreds of millions in donations from people that often thought they were doing good, "helped" very few people (medical care was so atrocious at her facilities helped may be a strong word), and used virtually all of the funds to simply promote her belief system.

Even in Catholic countries such as the Philippines word is slowly spreading about how bad she was. Less people than before speak well of her. In this day of internet and information, it is easier for people to learn about these kinds of things. Older generations still believe in her as good but they will eventually be taken over by the younger people who now know better.

Yeah Columbus was an asshole and thats why in my country October 12th is called "Dia del Encuentro de Dos Mundos" since we celebrate a fact rather than the individuals that lead to a genocide, might be just a name change but its a lot better imo

Here in Venezuela it was changed to "National Indigenous Resistance Day" which was nothing more than bullshit propaganda to flame the patriots into turning a blind eye into the current living conditions of the natives, but hey it's catchier!

Yeah it's not really about celebrating him as a person, more about recognizing the impact on world history of Europe finding the new world. Kind of a pivotal moment. Celebrating hatred of him seems to be more out of spite than him genuinely deserving a day out of the year worth thinking of.

Maybe around India, but not in the rest of the world. There are tons of Saints out there who are largely forgotton outside of the area they lived or worked in (unless their body was stolen from the Italians and interred elsewhere).

Exactly, they already knew that they were going to through with her canonization, getting Hitchens in was just a PR stunt to create the illusion that their bullshit process was somehow an objective one.

I think that the actual concept is that of the Red Team. It started with the military where you (the blue team) have exercises against an enemy. It moved to corporations and think tanks to test your way of thinking. Usually, you put your smarter players on the opposing side.

An ombudsman, in an organization, is to whom you report serious grievances. They're supposed to have the ability to be objective and investigate. It's what people think that HR departments do.

The Church does the same thing with apparitions and exorcism. They do everything possible to disprove claims of the sort, otherwise we'd have every Tom, Dick and Mary pulling an Always Sunny. Lots of people think we Catholics just cow tow to every random who claims to have seen the Virign Mary or a bleeding statue but the truth of it is the Church takes an awfully long time to conduct a thorough investigation into such claims. Which, as you pointed out, is actually to our advantage.

Be honest, they make a show of investigating this stuff so as to claim intellectual superiority later but they rubber stamp whatever they think will play well.

Don't forget one of Theresa's "miracles" to get her inducted into the saints club was curing a cancer which never existed. The woman, who was promised the world by the church, had treatable tuberculosis that was treated by her doctor.

It's the same with exorcism, they claim to do the impossible by ruling out mental illness before subjecting mentally ill people to abusive religious rituals.its farcical.

Well its not exactly a risk is it. They still have absolute control of the end decision and you don't get to know all the arguments against. So in fact it is in their interests to add as much legitimacy to the role as possible. Also as i am sure many will be aware the childrens homes run by the foundation were hotbeds of abuse.

I love Christopher Hitchens, but his position on the Iraq war was regrettable. In that video he claims at around 17:30 that the decision to invade Iraq would go down as the greatest achievement of American statecraft. I think he later changed his stance on the issue, like a lot of other commentators.

He wasn't the only one predicting it. I think most people knew it was going to happen just some people didn't care or thought the US having a presence was worse. Either because they hated America and thought the evil US military was worse or because they didn't think it was worth risking American lives. Regardless, everyone knew that the Iraqi military/govt was not stable enough to keep working unless they were crazy naive

I wish he was still alive just so he could have a conversation with Jordan Peterson. The Peterson and Sam Harris conversations were good, but the whole time I was wishing that Hitchens was still around so he could partake in the discussion.

Pope John Paul II reduced the power and changed the role of the office in 1983. This reform changed the canonization process considerably, helping John Paul II to usher in an unprecedented number of elevations: nearly 500 individuals were canonized and over 1,300 were beatified during his tenure as Pope as compared to only 98 canonizations by all his 20th-century predecessors.

Basically John Paul II changed the canonization process into the Arizona State admissions process.

If you like this concept, check out a small TV comedy from a couple of years ago called “You, Me and the Apocalypse”. It’s genuinely brilliant. About 10 episodes. Various sub plots but one of them is Rob Lowe as a heavy-drinking Vatican priest who, in the days before the apocalypse, is sent out by the Vatican to identify the anti-Christ. It’s hilarious.

The Catholic Church is surprisingly self reflective about their beliefs and the existence of God. They just don’t rest on the laurels of “its in the Bible so it must be true” trope. They were advanced in medicine,literature and astronomy for their respective eras. The Jesuit’s especially were known for a questioning belief in religion and existence.

I'm an atheist, and believe secularism is the way to go, but it's really hard to ignore that most religions bring with them a lot of discovery in fields like science, medicine, literature, and the arts, especially Christianity and Islam. Now that can be argued because they controlled those categories with an iron fist, but at the time they did it better than a petty king would, which I would say helped us in the long run.

For most of history organized religion served as a form of cultivating social trust and organization, and maintaining a set of collective laws and ethics so that a society could operate efficiently and relatively peacefully. When societies with conflicting sets of organizational structures and rules (i.e. religious leaders, organizations, and mandates) encountered foreign groups - they couldn't get along, which is why human conflict so often involved religion and ideology. Religion often adapted and reacted to material conditions, but passing a religious practice onto illiterate future generations is much easier than passing on a set of rational, secular methods of socialization and conflict arbitration.

The organization that religion offered was instrumental in a chaotic time for Europe, certainly, and helped to centralize Europe. But if you look at other cultures at the time, that isn't the case. The Byzantines, for example, had a strong central system that was utterly separate from the Orthodoxy. Being Byzantine was stronger for them than being Christian.

Then let's take a look at modern life. How many of your neighbors identify and form a community around Christianity? It's increasingly fewer as we go on. We have so much now in which to base an identity and form around that I don't think atheism has to provide any sort of central structure.

That's also ignoring the fact that very few atheists and agnostics form a core around their non-belief.

They just don’t rest on the laurels of “its in the Bible so it must be true” trope.

Minor point - only protestants do this. The Catholic argument is, if anything, the exact opposite - "it's in the Bible because it's true". (However Catholics do not believe in literal interpretation for most of the Bible, and much of it is to be interpreted).

The Bible was compiled by, and gets it's authority from the Catholic Church. The church doesn't "follow" the Bible, they wrote it. They're the ones who decided what books were authentic and which ones weren't.

It’s interesting to think that if the person holding the Devil’s Advocate position succeeds in convincing the Church not to give out sainthood to a candidate, then the advocate, in the eyes of the Church, has actually done God’s job in preventing the Devil’s candidate from being canonized.

Supposedly, made the people feel the pain by not treating them so that they feel closer to god however went for the best care by flying to California for her own sickness. Allegedly, only interested in the religious conversion than helping people.

When you think about it, this makes a lot of sense if you literally believe in heaven and hell. No suffering (or pleasure) on earth has any real significance compared to eternity, so any means are justified for conversions.

Of course, such fanaticism is frowned upon by most people now, myself included.

Except that when she herself fell ill she immediately went to Europe to get the most advanced medical care possible. So in her eyes the only people who should suffer were the poor Indians forced into her houses.

The justification I heard for it was that she believed, due to the fact that Jesus suffered on the cross, that suffering brought one closer to God, so patients were denied any and all forms of pain medication or any real consideration for their comfort. If you got busted up by a gang who knifed you seventeen times to steal whatever you had, well you're so blessed to be brought so close to God for the next several weeks as you recover and feel every agonizing moment of it. Of course, that's if you recover, because 90% of the money raised for her "hospital" was given to the church itself rather than used for any kind of healing ministrations, but that's okay, because suffering a long time before you die is like Jesus! The woman was sick in the head.

she raised millions of dollars in the name of her hospital, but gave it to the church rather then improve a dirty shack she called a hospital. she was known to praise the suffering of her patients and did little to help them to anything other then die.

Well, his dissent does go on record. Sainthood is a sort of nonsense (it allows a "monotheistic" religion to appoint saints over areas where pagans had gods and demigods: Ares = the patron saint of soldiers). And there are dubious saints - i.e. not recognized by both the Catholic and Orthodox churches, or Joan of Arc, who was dead a long time before sainthood.

IIRC Her "miracle" is that the new camera the crew was using to shoot a documentary had better low-light performance and they were astonished that they could see people in the footage with no artificial lighting. They attributed it to Mother Theresa "illuminating the room." It was so dark in this big fucking room because that's where they kept suffering people, chained up, in the dark, to fucking die. Alone. If any of this heaven/hell/supernatural shit is real, she's a spawn of Satan.

The cameraman attributed it to the film stock being good. The holy light thing was a beatup from the fanatically Catholic director Malcolm Muggeridge, and became a story that caught on. Maybe Kodak need to be canonized too.

Theresa was a fraud. My friends volunteered there and came out traumatised because of .

They sad that dying people would be denied pain killers and other comforting medicines because the lady believed that through undergoing pain these people are cleaning themselves of sin.

Some Christian ritual would be done for the dying people who were off different religion. I dont know the ritual, but it kind of made the Christain before death(No big deal for me, but people's consent should have been taken.).

Giving them to people who aren’t Catholics is really weird and wrong. But it also shows how caught up in their own world the sisters must have been. And even if all of the sick people would have been Christians, asking for their consent is the least the sisters should have done.

What did she do ? Accelerate suffering while she enjoyed first class care travelling first class across the world . Any idiot who thinks poverty and pain and suffering brings one closer to God needs a quick swift kick in the ass not a sainthood and adulation.

I met the woman when im Ireland and all i could think at the time was " you ain't fooling me lady " As sincere as a hookers kiss

As a sidebar , my brother is a highly regarded and respected nurse clinician and now a senior lecturer on nursing care and ethics .He visited Teresa's "hospital " and left after two days citing " intolerable hygiene " and lack of patient respect, poor nursing standards and overall systematic patient abuses .This was in 1987 .

In common parlance, the term devil's advocate describes someone who, given a certain point of view, takes a position he or she does not necessarily agree with (or simply an alternative position from the accepted norm), for the sake of debate or to explore the thought further.